I'm certain coding this way would be a Pretty Bad Idea ( especially as an undocumented language feature ) but it has a sort of appeal; though 70% of the appeal is just the sheer hackery of it with the rest being some theory that chaining may be easier to read than g(f(x)).

This sound like an interesting way to do reverse auto-boxing, by writing a module that exports a bunch of these methods as scalar variables, thus making it possible to treat a number of common operations as method calls without needing to wrap the basic scalars or messing with UNIVERSAL.

Thanks, that's similar and interesting. I have to say though i'm not tempted to use it, since it provides little comfort in use, as i still need to touch and modify each variable i want to call methods on.